The Masques of Ottawa

by Augustus Bridle

CALLED TO THE POLITICAL PULPIT

HON. NEWTON WESLEY ROWELL

N. W. Rowell has the bearing of a man who long ago felt that he was called to do something for a cause or a country and has never got over it. Meanwhile he has done much for both a cause and a country, and seems to have quit before the country had begun to enjoy more than the least agreeable elements in his character. To have suffered the insistent righteousness of Mr. Rowell so long, and at the close of the first period of his life when he seemed to be getting his own measure as a public man on a big stage, to see him withdraw like a chambered nautilus into his shell, not only from the Cabinet but from his seat in Durham, is a little hard on public patience. But of course the chambered nautilus may emerge again.

Years ago Mr. Rowell had moral energy enough to reconstruct a large part of the world in Liberalism and in the Methodist Church. Today he finds evangelic Liberalism rampant out on the skyline under such men as Crerar and Drury, and the church discussing social reformation in phraseology associated with dynamic ideas to which he never could be assimilated.

Mr. Rowell's career reminds us that there are four brands of Liberals in Canada: Evolutionary; Manchester School; Laurierite; Agrarian. Tories never evolve. There are only good Tories and bad ones.

He belongs to the first group, and there is nothing in his temperament to make him anything else. Free Trade never did convince him; he broke away from the enchanting tyranny of Laurier; and, though born on a farm, he never could revert to the plough-handles for a vision of the world.

Judging from some fairly recent preachments by able reverends such as Wm. Woodsworth and Salem Bland, there may be as many brands of Methodism. If so we unhesitatingly place Mr. Rowell in the evolutionary group. Therefore by personal development he is next thing to a Conservative; and the latest phase of his career proves that in working it out he has practised the fine old platitude of Polonius to Laertes:

"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Mr. Rowell is one of our most encouraging types of what is called the self-made man. Any Oxford professor hearing him make a typically good speech in London on "The Commonwealth of Nations under the Union Jack," would infer that he had taken a post-graduate course in political history after graduating as a B.A. But Mr. Rowell never even attended a High School. He went from the farm as a lad to be a parcel boy in a London, Ont., dry-good store. The class-meeting and the sermon and the Mechanics' Institute gave him a taste for serious literature. He came up in the oratorical county that produced G. W. Ross and J. A. Macdonald. He must have regularly read Tannage's sermons. He was a youth when the Y.M.C.A. movement invaded Canada along with baseball. He made the choice. He passed into the Law School, somehow dodging all the good brethren who advised him to go into the ministry. And through the opportunity afforded him by the successful practice of law and Liberalism on a large scale he has been able to preach his sermons to much bigger audiences than he ever could have found in the Methodist Church.

If some of the advanced radicals of these days would con over the outlines of a career like this, they might get rid of some of their fantastic notions about State-devised equality and emancipation. Mr. Rowell instinctively reached out by industry and enthusiasm for the forces that would better his condition. In so doing he spent a large part of himself upon the betterment of society. The result is an intellectual, moral and financially successful character of which any community might be proud—so long as the community contained but one of the kind.

Rowellism is a good salt. It is not good porridge. The average unprofessional Christian man cannot live on the levels where Mr. Rowell breathes so easily.

Time and again have we heard the equivocal remark about this man; if such, and however so. Why not take the man as he is and make the best of him? Surely by now he has proved that he has a definite and uplifting leverage on public life. It is of no use to complain that he never was cut out to be a leader in anything but ethical ideas of statesmanship. It was political makeshiftery to make such a man the leader of Ontario Liberalism, which did not ask to be led but to be cajoled and tricked up for the carnival. It was fatuous to imagine that he could ever become a chief of the National Liberal and Conservative party to which he now inextricably belongs. If secret ambition ever spurred him to indulge that dream—which seems incredible—sober reflection at the looking glass should have corrected the strabismus. Mr. Rowell is not a leader of men, in action; never was and never could be—without some drastic transformation in his outward character such as he has never shown.

The last time I observed Mr. Rowell he was in the lounge of a club where he had just finished lunch. All about him were scores of men in groups, each group animatedly intent upon some topic from baseball to high finance. A few weeks earlier that same club had given a public dinner to Mr. Rowell and Sir George Foster, when each seemed to overdo the other in gripping those present by the presentation of a world theme backed by a striking personality. In the lounge Mr. Rowell, our best authority on the ethics of the Empire and the League of Nations, went about alone, unobtrusive, drab-coloured, almost insignificant. He spoke to nobody and few men as much as noticed him. He nodded gravely now and again, but never smiled. Both hands in his trouser pockets, he seemed to be gazing at some vagabond blind spot in the room. He almost seemed to be whistling to himself like a lad in a forest. Presently he wandered out.

By no exercise of imagination could one conceive such a man as a Canadian political leader. If there is anything in an aura he has it not. A halo would have suited him better.

Three elements conspire to make Rowell:

Conscience; oratory; opportunity.

Most men have trouble enough with any two of the three. Mr. Rowell continues to hold our respect in spite of the whole trinity. Too much conscience always on duty at a peak load is no way to attract a vast variety of people who relish a degree of sinfulness now and again. We do not repudiate the value of conscience in public affairs. The public man without it provides almost the only sane argument for the preservation of the gallows. But when one man carries so much of it, a number of others may be excused for carrying less. This is an age of specialties.

It is required of a truly efficient conscience, however, that it be instant in season and out of season, and that it do not wait upon opportunity. When the Ross Government was so old in sin that even the new Globe editor accused the ship of having barnacles, we fail to remember that Mr. Rowell lifted his voice against it. He was a candidate for the Commons five years before James Whitney began his regime of government by indignation; at a time when if Ontario went on a political spree Ottawa got a headache. Big-party government was pretty strong in those days to keep a man like Rowell from talking out in meeting. The value of a conscience to a community, whatever it may be to an individual or a party, is in giving it a chance to speak out when something is wrong with your own group, not when it is politically convenient to take off the muffler. Mr. Rowell's method of opening Durham as a safe seat for himself by making a Senator of the Conservative member for Durham, was one way of reforming the Civil Service, which was one of his Government hobbies. But in practical politics it is sometimes necessary to do evil that good may come. Mr. Rowell needed a safe seat—in order to do his work for the country. It seems a pity that a constituency so shrewdly obtained could not have been steadfastly held.

As an orator Mr. Rowell is remarkable in spite of two defects; no classical or humanities education except what he diligently dug out of books, and a very thin voice. Few public speakers of our time use such admirable diction, and it is a rare one who can make so lean a voice thrill so completely with passion in the presentation of powerfully synthetic ideas. This is a great gift; but like personal beauty it has its fatal fascination. Mr. Rowell has not ceased to suffer from a sort of bondage to his oratory as he has from the tyranny of his conscience. In conversation he seldom just talks. He seems to deliver dicta. He rarely glows with the fire of the moment; he seems to be preparing for the grand occasion. The stage must be set. When did he ever make a poor speech that he had time to prepare? Or a good one impromptu? One cannot soon forget his remarkable speech in the Toronto Arena at the citizens' reception to Premier Borden in 1915. Here this lifelong Liberal made what up to that moment was the greatest speech of his career; and he was speaking as a British citizen, not as a Canadian Liberal.

With equal power, to a small group, but with even more passion as a broad-minded Canadian, he spoke to the Bonne Entente in Toronto in 1917 on a subject which may have had something to do with his future as a Dominion instead of a Provincial statesman. In this connection I quote from a report of that meeting made by the writer:

"He took his preconsidered skeleton of argument with all its careful alignment of crescendos and climaxes and clothed it with the passion of a rousing, emotionalizing speech. The points somewhat roughly made by other men he remade by a new grouping of the ideas. With eminent juridical clarity he worked himself up the ropes of oratory, and when he got to the tiptop of the trapeze he flung out his big compliment to the French-Canadians now at the front. Of course he said other things. He made fine use of the historic as he always manages to do. But when he got away from that into the great little story of Courcellette and the gallant 22nd with its sole surviving eighty men and two officers besides the C.O. "fighting the Germans like devils," he had voltage enough for an audience of ten thousand."

It is doubtful if Canada ever had a public speaker who with so little personal makeup for the part could so wonderfully deliver himself in orational speeches on any topic of nations, commonwealths and empires. If Rowell were less of an orator he would be more of a power as a public man. Carrying around loaded blank pistols is not nearly so congenial to most men as a cigar in the left hand vest pocket. There is in most of us a strain of buncombe which we exhibit often when others are not looking. I think Rowell exhibits most of his in solemn form in public. If one has not what is called savoir faire he must make his abstractions and silences confoundedly interesting. Rowell packs all his power into a speech. Therefore even his greatest speeches are sometimes to some people a bore.

I think he must have risen to about his height of unceremonious informality at a Peace dinner in London when he sat next to the plenipotentiary from Serbia, to whom he remarked:

"I should think so many dinners and public functions would be hard on your constitution."

"Yes," rejoined the Serbian with a gravely astute look at his companion; "but we have an upper and a lower chamber."

Rowell told this on himself. Even that he could not have done five years ago. Mingling with men more solemn than himself he observed the inconvenience of solemnity. He really wants to be a conductor of the little currents of energy that make men think and act in small groups. Some good parson years ago should have encouraged him to smoke between speeches.

Opportunity. This focuses the other two. Rowell has seldom neglected this mistress. It is comparatively easy for many men to make themselves at the Sign of the Dollar; as a rule more difficult at the Sign of Culture. Mr. Rowell is a man of fine intellectual attainments, which he has seldom failed to use in furthering his public success. Yet he was a good while becoming incorporated into the body politic of Liberalism. The world was his parish. Wesley was his idol; then Laurier. Between these two it is a marvel that even at the rather late age of forty-four he came to the leadership of Liberalism in Ontario. Here he became the prophet who would abolish the bar even before its time, not without provocation. There had been stories of wild drinking escapades among some of the Liberal leaders in Queen's Park. Mr. Rowell can therefore be amply forgiven for having been the instigator of that poster, "Is That You, Daddy?"

This can be remembered from his five years of misfit rule in Queen's Park when many of his good offices there are mainly forgotten. It was rather pitiful to observe how incapable Mr. Rowell was of giving vent to his great talents in that Legislature. He did not understand the lingo. Most of it was too piffling and small. He knew Ontario better from the angle of corporation law. He made a poor showing as leader, for there were no great issues in which he could lead; though he did initiate a great deal of useful welfare legislation. He made one heroic effort to understand New Ontario in the rough when he donned overalls and went down in some of the mines. But it was all too much in the rough. One imagines there must have been many a moment when he wished he had never taken that leadership with so precious little to lead, and yearned for some larger way. But it was a long, long trail. And Laurier was now a strange old man. Whichever way he looked he was in a blind alley.

The Coalition gave him a way out. The old chief's attitude towards the war made Laurier Liberalism still more unpalatable. Rowell was deeply stirred by the war. He could see in the upheaval of old and new world ideas the sort of grand realignment which he could understand; the assertion of true Liberalism in true democracy. Any average speech of his during the war demonstrates that he was among those few leaders of thought whom the struggle lifted into a larger conception of manhood in the State.

Again, honesty to himself suggests that Mr. Rowell did not suffer such pangs at his severance from Laurier as did men like Carvell, Guthrie and Clark, who had fought under the old man in Commons. At the Liberal Win-the-War meeting in 1917, he threw off all disguises and fervently proclaimed that he had chosen to take office under "the greatest Premier in the world." The statement smacked not so much of insincerity as of a sense of emancipation. Mr. Rowell was no longer labelled a Laurier Liberal. He was a free agent in a new great conflict of force. He was stirred as never he had been. Of all the Liberals who took oath under the new administration he was the strongest, and the most difficult to assign a competent task. He was made President of the Council and Minister of Information. The peculiar advantage of the latter was that as real information was the last thing that seemed to be wanted by anything resembling a Government, there was very little for Mr. Rowell to do at his desk and very much time for him to be absent where he felt much more at home, in Europe. As President of the Council he had great ability.

This one year of Ministry before the end of the war gave Mr. Rowell an opportunity to survey forces of whose operation he had no knowledge while he remained a mere Liberal. He became officially familiar to London and as the constant companion of the Premier came very near to the elbows of the great, when he did not suffer by comparison.

But it was the Peace Conference that gave him his real work. During the war any nation got the prestige that it could win, either by its own efforts or in league with others. All nations on each side were more or less animated by the one great purpose. Suddenly the golden grip of union was off. The second war began around the Peace table. In this new and more precarious conflict of pour-parlers and old secret diplomacies under the dangerous flare of the self-determination torch, national selfishness rushed to the front of the stage. Every pocket of people in Europe hemmed between a river, a mountain and a dialect claimed the rights of a nation, when more than half of them should have been conveniently merged into workable groups having some form of government with which nations of experience could deal.

In this clamour of the voces populi the voice of Canada was not to be disregarded. We had reason that it should be heard. We were in sudden danger of being overshadowed at the Conference by the vast figure of the other half of North America. Mr. Rowell has never been an anti-Yankee. He has too much fine sense ever to pull feathers out of the eagle in retaliation for twisting the lion's tail. He knows as well as any man the strategic and moral necessity of Canada being the real House of Interpreter to the two leading Anglo-nations. He knew it at the Conference. But he knew also that in proportion to service and sacrifice in the war, Canada in the Council of Peace had a right to be heard and considered as the voice of a nation occupying the northern half of North America.

There was great sense in the estimate of a leading London correspondent that among the four most impressive and masterful personalities at the Geneva Assembly of the League, Rowell the Canadian was at least the fourth. This was not merely a personal or natural compliment. It was the sincere recognition of a fact.

Mr. Rowell had the gift and the energy of will to translate the Peace into Canadian language. He gave Canada a voice in Europe. He did try so far as one man might to play up to the voice given to Canada by the dead in Flanders. In the big occasion when great tumult of forces were rushing to a climax Rowell rose to the opportunity—as he always has done—and he earned the lasting gratitude of his country. We needed just that intellectual power and that moral audacity, not only in Europe but in Washington.

Yes, N. W. Rowell has made a big use of opportunity. He has even created it. But it was seldom the little simple thing at his door that roused his great qualities. It was the bigger issue that lay out among the mountain tops. He was overwhelmingly eloquent for the universal eight-hour day when he attended the International Labour Conference in Washington. The League of Nations had recommended it. But what of the cheap-labour competition in the Orient? And what did Mr. Rowell know about Industry and Democracy at all?

Mr. Rowell made a bold bid for recognition as a statesman of international repute. And he got it. His speeches on the Empire were consistently a greater voice than Borden ever could have had. The colleague of the Premier became his Imperial master because he had the power which Borden lacked, of making the British world-Commonwealth live in great public utterances.

What a journey had this man travelled now from "Is That You Daddy?" in
Queen's Park!

And it may be sensibly asked—What was his great intention? Canada is interested to know what is "the big idea" in this man's mind. Corporation law cannot contain him now. He has tried his strength and knows it. He knows that other men know it.

Once during the derelict days of the Coalition it was rumoured that Rowell on a Western trip would sketch out a new leadership—for himself. But he was not a man to throw Borden overboard. He had a profound respect for the Premier, who had made great use of him.

Perhaps, if only Rowell had been born Conservative instead of a Win-the-War Liberal converted into a Coalitionist, the Premier might have called him to succeed. We know not. There was a predicament. White, Meighen, Rowell—all must be considered. There was the Washington post, if ever it should come to be. Did Mr. Rowell ever intimate that he wanted either of these? Nobody has said. But Sir Robert was wise at least not to have offered him the Premiership. Too long had that been the office of a man who could not lead. It was time for a leader. It is not surprising that Mr. Rowell should have stepped out of the Administration when Meighen went to the head of it. He could not comfortably serve under Meighen. Ambition is a tyrant. Self-sacrifice is usually easiest when great moral issues are uppermost. For more than one session he would not even retain his seat in the House. His retirement opens Durham, a safe constituency under Rowell, and may weaken the Government.

But what if it does? Mr. Rowell took office as a Coalitionist to win the war. The war is won. But his work—is only nicely beginning. How is he going to finish his work for this nation? He has not said. Not by making sundry speeches about the League of Nations.

If this country is to go ahead on its own native steam, it must be wise enough to find a big public place for the great talents of N. W. Rowell. And if Mr. Rowell, or any other disciple of opportunity in public affairs, wants to give Canada what she has a right to expect from him, he will do well to make his needed money now at corporation law, and when he comes back to public life have a constant eye single to the glory of his country.

To evolve men of that stamp is not easy. Rowell, like Meighen, is a product of the older studious days when youths buried themselves in books for the sake of getting on in the world without reference to mere money. He is now at an age when the best he has made of himself might be of incalculable good to the country if he could help the Government to go back to power and go with the National Liberal-Conservative Party as conscientiously as he entered the Unionist Government.

Conscience; Oratory; Opportunity. The greatest of these is Conscience; the least, Opportunity.